I had never gotten around to renting this one before. Somehow, it has always slipped under my radar. It came up finally under my Netflix queue and voila!
From 1949, Under Capricorn pairs up two of my favorite screen stars so this is another wonder that I had never seen this one yet. An uncharacteristic historical novel set to the screen for director Alfred Hitchcock, it stars Joseph Cotten and Ingrid Bergman as a married couple in 1830s Australia. You know what they say about Australia being populated by nothing but criminals. That is why Cotten was sent there from his home country of Ireland. Bergman followed him, foolishly in love.
The story starts with some Irish git gentleman that has not a penny in the world and wants to find his stake. He finds Cotten who is now one of the richest men in New South Wales. When he finally meets Bergman, and small world that it is as she was once his sister’s best friend, she is drunker than a skunk and can barely stand.
That starts the slight mystery. There is a wicked staff employed by Cotten and some little things to figure out along the way, such as Bergman seeing things that aren’t there. I was watching, waiting for it to get better.
It was worth watching. I was enthralled at the characters. Cotten and Bergman again did supremely excellent jobs, although I thought Bergman overacting a bit during one emotional scene, making it the same acting job as in her movie Gaslight. The actor who played Charles the Irish gentleman, Michael Wilding, was okay, I mean, he played the role well, but I think it needed to be someone bigger, with a greater stage presence and rugged good looks. Maybe that is why I did not see the love triangle as anything but forced because he did not seem suave enough. That might just be my tastes there.
I just don’t see why Hitchcock did this one. I will have to research that. He wasn’t under his contract with David Selznick anymore. It had the feeling of a very well done made-for-tv movie. The soap opera elements made it interesting to watch. I had to keep watching just to find out how it would all explode.
For the Hitchcock fan, or a Cotten or Bergman fan, it was well worth watching. It is not one of Hitchcock’s better movies, but then I am comparing this to some of his really supreme movies out there. Now that I have seen this once, I can check it off my list of Hitchcock movies and leave it at that. I will give it three out of five stars because I was interested in this the first time around, but unlike his other movies, I don’t think I will go out of my way to see this one again.
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